Curses!

We’ll give a pass to the construction worker -- described in the New York Post as a “hulking mason” and a “Boston-loving boob” -- who buried a Boston Red Sox jersey in the concrete foundation of the new stadium being built for the New York Yankees. And we can almost forgive the fans on both sides of the Other Coast’s fiercest sports rivalry for thinking this might somehow lay a curse on the plutocrats in pinstripes.

But when somebody in the Yankees’ front office ordered construction workers on Sunday to drill chunks out of the foundation -- a five-hour job that cost a reported $50,000 -- in order to remove the voodoo Fan Merchandise of Doom, it became clear that this incident was more than just a harmless sports prank. It was a reminder that for all of humanity’s pretensions to modernity and reason, we are essentially just bald monkeys who wear shoes.

Nobody knows when the notion that symbolic objects carry magical power started, but it’s an idea even older than Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield. As long ago as 2000 BC, Egyptians were burying execration texts -- clay tablets or statues inscribed with the names of enemies, then broken and entombed as a way of assuring the villains’ undoing. The ancient Greeks and Romans favored curse tablets, often consisting of thin lead sheets on which the name and crimes of the accursed would be written (along with a plea to the gods for his or her destruction) before the thing was rolled up, punctured with nails and buried.

We’ve had about 4,000 years to evolve since then. New gods have replaced Amun-Ra and Jupiter; the concept of a divine right of kings makes us giggle; and we are more amused than terrified by witches, who mostly call themselves Wiccans these days and often look good in pewter jewelry. And yet the owners of a Major League Baseball team are so fearful of a modern-day curse tablet that they’re willing to spend thousands of dollars to thwart the spell-casting efforts of a working-class warlock from the Bronx.

Saints preserve us.